THE LAND OF UNLIKENESS

“A Discussion in Sophiology and Magic:  Renaissance Precursors to Bulgakov” — PART FOUR

By Janet Leslie Blumberg (Deep Grace of Theory)

Wow, Joshua. You responded to every issue I raised, only more succinctly than I had managed to raise them. (In fact, I had to throw away two previous responses, because I discovered I hadn’t read your reply deeply enough yet.)

I find myself much won….

As you say, surely, what is most important is to think through the application of sophiology in contemporary culture. And that means most of all thinking how Bulgakov helps us to “maintain our openness to knowing that we are known by God.”

Contemporary culture is in dire need of profound hedges against positivism. It is in dire need of a genuine re-awakening of respect and recognition for “an experimental use of reason itself that breaks onto the terrain of the transcendent.” Bulgakov involves us in a reading and a thinking that nurtures both. I also understand your use of the Renaissance humanists to call for a wilder science, a more natural religion, and a Christian spirituality that vindicates pagan instincts, because humanity itself comes from God and bears God’s image in its inmost core.

We truly need today, also, a rebaptism of human desiring, and a renewed vision of the philosophical practice of life that makes it, once again, an education in desiring.  We find this in Bulgakov’s rich and subtle indwelling of the principle that “God is love.”

Bulgakov excites us, also, by liberating within us what you call the “pre-modern archaic trust in a profound affinity of the self with the cosmos.” In a certain sense, therefore, this makes him subversive of the same “Victorian, bourgeoise, and Enlightenment liberal” structures/strictures that caused such immense depths of misery and quiet desperation in the 19th century, and gave rise to the anti-humanisms of the Nietzschean tradition. (This was the language of paradox, after all. How anti-humanistic is it, finally, to oppose an established “humanism” that is deadly to human beings?)

Most of all, I understand why you seek a practice of trust in the cosmos and in God that “embraces more of its dangers, risks, and seemingly chaotic elements than modern paradigms have been willing to do.” As you say, modern paradigms have allowed minimal degrees of chaos only in order to control them to the maximum degree. But let me just add, if I may, that we might be in quite a different situation right now, from that within which arose the anti-humanistic visions of a transpersonal humanity, or the phenomenological and poststructuralist resistances to techological thinking and materialistic reductionisms.

Physics has spent the past 100 years transforming its own formal understandings of what the world is like, and of what a science is, making knowing heuristic again: making it provisional and unfinalized, a rigorous ongoing theorizing that interrogates its own past even while using it, but that is also always in willing submision to the next, as-yet-unknowable, but ever-faithful, paradigm shift in its future….  (The same kind of vision-of-knowing, then, that motivated each of the eager new contributions to their tradition from the medieval theologians, for example.)

Most wonder-ful of all, we see in physics the re-opening of that salvific gap between our own heuristic formalizations (our logoi or accounts) and the deep reality to which they seek to do justice. This was the original Socratic opening that energized the pursuit of the liberal arts and sciences, and sustained it for the first 2000 years of its now 2400-year-old history.

Because of physics, and because of correlative revisions within every other academic discipline during the 20th century, we may not be confined at this point to rehearsing and negotiating the tragedy of the scientific Enlightenment, which always entails also the tragedy of its loss.  (Derrida, for instance, determined himself always to view the situation as tragic, which was his own practice of faithfulness to it).

Instead, we might have right now a renewed opening for freshly re-theorizing the disciplines, and for bringing to light once again their inherent magic. It might be that we can reclaim the once so rich and elegant (and so richly and elegantly qualified) humanistic agency — an agency that came to be buried and overwhelmed by the thought of a Newtonian “material” world, ruled by single monolithic and mechanical determinism. Since that monolith first loomed, we have had one overwhelming determinism offered after another…all of them deeply instructive, but incapable of extinguishing the personal styles in which human thought nonetheless continues to dwell.

Yes, we require “a kind of magic,” no doubt of that. We desperately need a power for thought that can open (or re-open) those liberating places of in-determinacy that are always constituting a kind of chora for the re-birthings of humanity, religion, and science. But how do we effect this? (Always assuming, of course – and this too is a gamble, a risk, and a daring – that the thought-work carried on by every human generation is a significant and needful contribution to this unending human-divine project.)

Perhaps you and I, Joshua, are devoted to exactly the same project, while working at it from different locations. There is an energy in the writers you cite that seems to aspire, through their wild and joyous subversions and their baroque — or “subliminal” — inventions, to leave all determinacy behind altogether, in ascending to that Cosmic Humanity…. (This is again that problematic of the impersonal vis-avis the im-personed, with all its problems — and glories — of impersonation.)

Is it perhaps that one seeks a practice of magic that would finally transcend the realms of structure and limit entirely? (This is why I cannot accept the Deleusian notion of imperceptible variations, for instance. To me there must be determinate structure underlying the freedom from structure that is being achieved…. a matter of supersubtle perceptions, if you will….)

For myself, I seem to treasure determinacy and to see in it the paradoxical source of every potential for transformation and self-transcendence. I want above all to re-open determinacy itself.  Not to allow the over-determinations of the Enlightenment to cause us to situate determinacy itself as the enemy. Human eudaimonia, for me, accordingly, would lie in a personal union with God, and not in that dissolving away into the nothingness of the divine being that is so much spoken of among the contemplatives and the neoplatonists.

But in either case, however, and by any and all means, let us set aside the mistaken epistemology of the modern centuries by offering better, and let us reclaim the “wisdom” of the Socratic tradition, the wisdom of Bulgakov, the wisdom of traditional religious knowing, and the contemporary wisdom about knowing that is shared (unbeknownst) between contemporary physicists and cultural theorists alike.

What I’ve just said reminds me a little of Zizek’s joke about how the deconstructionist cannot say “I love you.” Instead, the Derridean will issue forth with all of those past antecedent conditionals and “accordings to a certain trajectory of thought” and the “if one were able to believe” and so on and so forth. The punch line to Zizek’s story comes when he remarks that there used to be a time, back in the day, when we simply hazarded those three words “I love you,” and when we did that, all of those qualifications were already included in the words….

I would like to show that “back in the day,” it was not the case that we used to believe in absolutes or  that our creeds were statements of a truth that was certain and indubitable. No, in the old days, before the rise of scientism, truth was in herself much more difficult to come by than that – and more alluring and rewarding. It was the upstart era of mechanism and determinism that taught us to think like that about truth. And now, it has been the honesty and brilliance of physics that has taught us not to think like that, because the world is not like that, and neither are our paths of knowing.

The gloriously human responsibility can be back upon our shoulders, as Christians and as Socratic philosophers, to engage in the unexpected journeys of coming to know that only occur when we genuinely trust in our subject (Subject) to correct and challenge us in our efforts. This is why we must have the formulas and creeds handed down to us by our traditions of knowing, but we are to use them as vehicles, in order to move into deeper contact with the realities they seek to represent. When such processes bring about those moments of truth — as an Augustinian Polanyi defined truth to be “any deep contact with reality” — such actual contacts tends to shatter as much as to confirm our formulations. In those moments of truth within all of our disciplines, we find a stronger power-for-knowing, and with it a stronger human agency, being determined within us. Such experiences in knowing occur when in an instant we see our creeds or formulas simultaneously fulfilled and transcended. We reclaim more deeply what they must always really have meant.

But in the final analysis… Between, on the one hand, an on-going heuristic thinking – itself always a re-thinking — of the modes of determinacy maintaining all determinate structures (structures themselves dynamically in movement and irreducible to a simple unity), and on the other hand, a thinking that genuinely liberates potentiality through the subversion and transcendence of determinacies, there may be no determinate difference at all.

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